Edgerton gives 'Wish You Were Here' a solid grip

The Australian star Joel Edgerton is a brilliant question mark of an actor.

As he swaggers his way through the role of Tom Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby," his caricature of high-society machismo becomes a repellent force, not a character. But as a boyishly volatile Stanley Kowalski he was the best thing in the 2009 stage production of "A Streetcar Named Desire," which won inexplicable raves for the way Cate Blanchett turned Blanche Dubois into a combination of noble victim and bawdy camp. And in the offbeat sports film "Warrior" (2011) he was a revelation as an American high school physics teacher – a husband and father with a foreclosure breathing down his neck – who seeks to win a mixed-martial-arts championship in order to regain his self-respect and solvency. He was nimble and continually surprising as a good guy who turned out not to be as pure as he looked.

In the Australian chiller with the ironic title "Wish You Were Here," Edgerton plumbs even deeper mixed emotions – and proves himself a master at playing psychological peek-a-boo with the audience. He pulls us into the emotional maelstrom of Dave Flannery, a middle-class architect who loses his moorings during an impromptu jaunt from his home in Sydney to a beach town in Cambodia. He wants his pregnant wife Alice (Felicity Price), a teacher, to enjoy some carefree time in the sun before she gives birth to their third child. What's more, his sister-in-law Steph (Teresa Palmer) has insisted that they go with her. She isn't comfortable traveling with her new boyfriend, a slick importer named Jeremy (Antony Starr) who does business where they're staying, in Sihanoukville.

In the opening vacation montage, they all let their hair down. They fantasize about other dreamy getaways; they gyrate on a dance floor. They stroll through an open market and do the touristy "wild things" that are supposed to be emotionally liberating, like allowing a man at a bazaar to plant a half-dozen tarantulas on their arms. But this happy sequence ends abruptly with a shot of Dave looking out-of-it and wounded, wandering by himself through a desolate landscape. After he and Alice return to Sydney we learn that Jeremy disappeared during their last hard-partying night in Cambodia.

Under the direction of her real-life husband, actor-turned-filmmaker Kieran Darcy-Smith, Price plays Alice with rare domestic passion and intelligence. (Price and Darcy-Smith also co-wrote the script.) She can sense that Dave hasn't told her everything he knows about Jeremy's disappearance. But she tries to live with her husband's secrets. Whether at home or in class, Alice almost always passes Hemingway's test of courage: She shows grace under pressure. She does lose control once – and the outcome is harrowing.

Price's Alice is the heart of the movie. But Edgerton's Dave provides its vise-like grip and tortured conscience. The film cuts back and forth between the couple trying to resume their life in Sydney and their recollections of their Cambodian getaway, now heightened because any offhand act or comment could contain a clue to Jeremy's whereabouts. As Dave relives that part-dreamy, part-nightmarish time, Edgerton subtly, electrically expresses the man's covert thoughts and feelings, from his skepticism about the supposed ease of Jeremy's affluent life to his abashment and erotic curiosity when he's with the shockingly flirty Steph. (Palmer is terrific, too, conveying her character's neediness as well as her flightiness.)

Edgerton made his first big splash in America just a few years ago, in the ace Australian crime film "Animal Kingdom." It's rare for hard-guy actors to show their range so swiftly. In "Wish You Were Here," Edgerton embodies Dave's shock and grief, and his escalating vulnerability, with a peerless veracity. Too many suspense films are geared to get audiences rooting for the worst to happen, so they can witness splashy mayhem. "Wish You Were Here" is modest in scope, but its goals are bracingly humane. You want the mystery to be solved. You also want this marriage to be saved.